In this edition of The Midweek Download, we have stories on the first Windows Phone 8 device from Samsung, Windows Azure Mobile Services and tips on how to find your way around in Windows 8.

Meet the Samsung ATIV S – the first of many Windows Phone 8 devices coming this year. Today at IFA in Berlin, Samsung lifted the curtain on its first Windows Phone 8 device, the ATIV S. This is just the first in a big lineup of new hardware that’s coming with Windows Phone 8, but it’s a seriously impressive opening salvo. Samsung built the ATIV S with the latest and greatest technology, especially for anyone who wants a superphone that’s equal parts powerhouse and head turner. Head on over to The Windows Phone Blog to read more about this great new device. That’s a screenshot of the ATIV S to the left.

From Next at Microsoft: My favorite key on Windows 8. “ – this is fast becoming my favorite key in Windows 8. I’ve been upgrading all of my machines to the release version of the software over the last week and in particular enjoying the experience on my Sony Vaio Z when connected up to two monitors at home,” writes Next at Microsoft Editor Steve Clayton. “For power users like myself, +X brings up some common administrative and power user tasks.” To find out more, check out the rest of Steve’s post over on Next.

Introducing Windows Azure Mobile Services: A backend for your connected client apps. We’re very excited to announce the Preview Release of Windows Azure Mobile Services! Mobile Services allow you to connect your Windows 8 apps to a cloud backend hosted in Windows Azure and easily store structured data, authenticate users and send push notifications. More importantly, Mobile Services enables you to accomplish these tasks within minutes. The Windows Azure Team Blog has the rest of the story.

App developers: What you need to know about playing media to make your app shine in Windows 8. For Windows 8, we made some changes in our audio system designed to improve the app experience. In this Aug. 23 post on the Windows 8 App Developer Blog, we discuss these changes, and how you can take advantage of them in your media apps. Hopefully this info helps you better understand how audio works in Windows Store apps, especially when it comes to audio playback in the background.

From The Windows Phone Developer Blog: Memory profiling. In previous installments, we explained how the Heap Summary view of the Windows Phone Performance Analysis Tool provided a categorized demographic representation of heap activity, and that the Types view presented a convenient grouping of the participating types. In this Aug. 24 post, we focus on the Instances view, which takes things a step further by presenting an account of the lifetime of every allocated instance of each of the participating types.

Click-to-Run and Office on Demand. If you’ve downloaded the new Office Customer Preview, then you probably noticed that your installation experience is quite a bit different than in any previous version of Office. These changes aren’t just cosmetic, they’re part of our strategy to bring the rich Office applications that you know and love into the future as an integrated part of our Software + Services offering. In this Monday post on Office Next, we’ll talk about why we think it’s important to invest in client delivery, what we did, how we did it, and what it means to you in your everyday interactions with the new Office.

PowerPoint 2013: Presentation is everything. When you open the new PowerPoint, you’ll see a start page with your recently opened presentations next to a gallery of new themes. In the Customer Preview, we’ve included eight newly designed themes, and the release version will have many more. You can double-click any of these to immediately create a new presentation that looks beautiful right from the start. Head on over to the PowerPoint Blog for the rest of the story.

That’s it for this edition of The Midweek Download! Thanks for reading!